Farrah Ahmed (University of Oxford) has posted Personal Autonomy and the Option of
Religious Law, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family
(forthcoming), on SSRN.Here is the
abstract:

The ‘millet’ and 'personal law'
systems, found in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia and Israel, are
long-standing models of state accommodation of religious norms in family law.
This paper, a work of applied normative legal theory, uses the Indian system of
personal laws as a test-case to consider the extent to which these modes of
accommodation undermine personal autonomy.

In particular, it studies the
claim, made both in the context of the Indian personal law system and in
debates in other jurisdictions on the use of religious norms in family law,
that if people had a choice between religious law and generally-applicable
secular law, this would remove any objection to such systems on the grounds of
personal autonomy. It also studies the further claim that such a power to
choose would actually make the personal law system better for personal autonomy
than a system of general secular laws.

Liberal states, including the United Kingdom and Canada, increasingly face calls from
religious groups to reform family law in order to accommodate religious norms.
The conclusions of this paper contribute to the broader question of whether
these states should do so, as well as the question of what form any
accommodation should take.